It was late and my girlfriend had retired in disgust. She was right to. I was immobile on the couch, watching live coverage of the Boston manhunt from an American broadcast, and dumbly forgiving of the rolling nothingness

In David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King, about—wait for it—the metaphysics of boredom in a bureaucracy, he writes: “True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”

Two quotes and a movie was all it took. I scratched my Labor column. Others could examine the party’s existential nausea. I’d reached a combustible temperature on something else: rape and the creeps who defend it.

Canberra turns 100 this year, but awkwardly it seems Australians have forgotten its birthday. The Bush Capital must now be cursing its weird remoteness, and the fact that outside its borders ”Canberra” is not the name of a city, but shorthand for political bastardry.

It was not until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 that the world began to grasp the diabolical scale of repression in East Germany. The Stasi—East Germany’s secret police—may have overseen a fatally diseased economy…

I wasn’t going to write about Michelle Grattan’s departure from The Age. Cyber feelings were unusually wired, and I happen to write for her old ‘paper. Best to stay out of the fray, I thought. Don’t get zapped.

It was not a good year for writers or language, and a particularly bloody one for journalists. According to Reporters Without Borders, it was the deadliest on record since its first yearly report in 1995. 88 journalists killed, 2,000 threatened or attacked…

“To write poetry after Auschwitz,” wrote German philosopher Theodore Adorno, “is barbaric.” Adorno’s famous decree was a sort of melancholic resignation a belief that along with six million people, the Holocaust had expunged meaning itself, and exposed the lie…

Like many of you, my real education at high-school occurred outside the classroom. I learnt about suicide when a girl threw herself off an overpass, and learnt about the ineffectual oddities of local politics when that overpass was caged, and the one 200 metres…

You probably missed it amid the rancour, as Parliament slunk towards its summer adjournment and somewhere got stuck in mutually assured distraction. Or perhaps it was eclipsed by the slush fund story that is, in many ways, a meta-story…

I’m in Perth researching a book about murder, meaning and the colourful constellation system of justice. The institutions that formally comprise it, and the variety of individuals involuntarily thrown into it. What are their roles? How do they each make sense…

So I’m late to the Gillard Speech party, or at least the ensuing commentary about the commentary. So shoot me. I didn’t much like the party, filled with cowboys and girls, their guns loaded with smug certitude and me just packing an old-fashioned…

In July, American comic Tig Notaro was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. This was just the latest splash of fate’s bilge water: in previous months, Notaro had suffered a break-up, a bacterial disease and the sudden death of her mother.

In August last year a warning was issued: the public’s “deep malaise” would be stripped from Newspoll and rudely supplanted to the nation’s highways. Yes, the Convoy of No Confidence was rumbling into town where this travelling circus of indignation would…

Waleed Aly could barely contain his anger. In his Monday column on Sydney’s protest, you could trace the hard edge of his incredulity. Typically, though, Aly’s frustration was elegantly transposed into a thoughtful and muscular piece.